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was a nightmare. I don't think any auto company in the world has done that,' says Kant.
Output recovered after a new factory was established in Gujarat, but the combination of
the price, customer apathy and slow production build-up (plus some electrical fires in the
cars) meant that only 175,000 were sold in the first two years compared with a production
capacity of 250,000 a year. Later, the Nano was revamped with stylish colour schemes and
a bigger engine with the aim of becoming an iconic low-priced car that would appeal to the
middle class, not mass buyers.
While the Nano remained frugal, a family engineering company in Bengaluru was show-
ing how to develop new engineering at low cost with plastic-bodied electric cars.
The Reva Dream
'Frugal engineering is jugaad plus innovation,' says Sudarshan Maini, an engineering en-
thusiast and perfectionist. 'When you see that jugaad is not producing the right quality and
quantity for what you need, you innovate further to achieve it. That makes it a stepping
stone to both innovation and frugal engineering.'
On my first visit to India in 1982, Maini held up a small precision-tuned automotive
component between his fingers. 'This is what we can produce in India,' he proudly told me,
standing in the Bengaluru factory of Maini Precision Products, a company he had set up
nine years earlier to prove he could turn out international quality engineering components
to micro tolerances and attract export customers. The finely machined and ground compon-
ent was a cast iron lapping mandrel with a tolerance of 1 micron which, Maini explained,
ensured the fine internal finish needed for fuel injection systems. Such levels of precision
were all but unknown in India. Maini became motivated at the beginning of his career in
the 1960s at Guest Keen & Williams (part of the British GKN group) in Kolkata. 'So much
was being talked about poor quality, but I knew we could produce the best quality in the
world,' he says.
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Maini's memories illustrate the problems that the manufacturing industry faced in the
early decades of independence. He was frustrated by the standards of work and by 'lots
of wasteful scrap and poor production' at the Koltata factory when he took over as the
company's first Indian assistant manager. Employees were work-shy and management was
weak. He tells a story about a man who had been given two weeks' leave every year for the
previous five years after producing telegrams that said his father had died.
'I called him and asked, “How many fathers do you have?”,' says Maini. 'He was very
upset and said he was going to kill the personal officer who had taken 500 rupees every
year for getting the leave sanctioned.'
